Salvation

Salvation Sequence, Book 1

By: Peter F. Hamilton

Narrated by: John Lee

In 2204, humanity is expanding into the wider galaxy in leaps and bounds. Cutting-edge technology of linked jump gates has rendered most forms of transportation - including starships - virtually obsolete. Every place on Earth, every distant planet humankind has settled, is now merely a step away from any other. And all seems wonderful - until a crashed alien spaceship of unknown origin is found on a newly located world 89 light-years from Earth, carrying a cargo as strange as it is horrifying. To assess the potential of the threat a high-powered team is dispatched to investigate. But one of them may not be all they seem....

Bursting with tension and big ideas, Salvation is the first book of an all-new series that highlights the inventiveness of an author at the top of his game.

©2018 Peter F. Hamilton (P)2018 Tantor

Critic reviews

“Peter F. Hamilton smashes through the crazy battlefield of space opera like a giant all-conquering war-robot. His newest is loud, proud, and beyond epic. Accept no substitutes, this is the real deal. You need Salvation, my friend.” (Ian McDonald, author of the Luna series)

Canterbury Tales of first contact

The storytelling format may throw you off at first as it's a bunch of disconnected tales of life in future earth as well as of distant future humanity. It's reminiscent of Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos in some ways. At first, I was irritated and distracted by never getting to stay with anyone long enough to get into the characters. These aren't quite self-contained short stories with a satisfying ark (as in Hyperion). However, this is Peter F Hamilton - and this is Book 1. All those tales are tied together and deeply interconnected - and you only get the first hints of that near the end of this novel. There will be a lot more text before it's all clear. And I can't wait.
It may not be for everyone - it's long-winded space opera, but seems less frustratingly long winded than some of Hamilton's earlier work.
My biggest complaint is that John Lee's narration has all started to blur together for me. I've listened to a lot of Hamilton's work narrated by Lee. Lee doesn't have the biggest range of truly distinct voices - and Hamilton's novels have a huge cast. Within a single novel, character voices start to get a little blurred together - and after a few, I'm frequently confused which character I'm hearing and if they're from this novel or not...

Started slow and ended well

Mr Hamilton is very good at building background, almost too good. I got lost in the characters and time jumping for the first 1/4 of the book but then the patter stabilized and it made sense.

I still feel like a lot of the background was not truly needed and focusing on the story would have been better. It’s not quite as engrossing or grand as the Commonwealth stories however it has the potential.

I look forward to the next.

A book with an interesting idea

To start with, I overall enjoyed this book I think. I like sci-fi for its ability to explore how technological advances can potentially change life, and Salvation did that perfectly. The idea most thoroughly explored in this series I think was what would happen if humans figured a way to make portals like from the "Portal" video game. John Lee's performance is as always, quite spectacular. I think maybe my only complaint would be that too many voices ended up sounding the same. A mix of eastern European accents, bordering on Russian. I give the story a 3/5 though because I tend to hate stories that shift POV quite a bit. This book shifts between 3 view points that can be categorized as Past, Present, and Future. The characters in the Present and Future remain stable, but all of those chapters are quite short in comparison to the length of the Past chapters. The Past chapters also introduce a lot of [unimportant] characters and I found my self actually forgetting who the characters were in the Present and Future when it switched to those views. This story also functions like a mystery in some ways, but you probably won't figure it out until its revealed to you at the end. Some of the Past stories serve to lay a feeling of "Something weird is going on." while one only serves to explain why 2 characters in the present don't like each other. Considering how little is covered in the Present, it seems like a waste of paper honestly. Maybe that will change in the next book. As it stands, this is mostly a series of short stories with some content to fit them together within one universe. Final minor complaint is that some descriptions of scenes or ships were sometimes to hard to imagine. The best example is the first Future story with training in space. I have no idea what was going on so I just imagined it was all similar to scenes from Ender's Game. A fair warning though. Some of the ideas that Hamilton explored in this book feel like they are subtle commentaries about society today in some way. ex: There is a new branch of humans in this book that is both genders and cycles between male and female. Hamilton uses different pronouns for these characters. Sie (sounds like "sea" almost)=She/He and Hir (sounds like "her" but its subtly different)=Her/Him. None of this stuff bothered me, but it ran me for a loop when I first heard this stuff and wasn't sure what was going on. I give this a 4/5. Even with my complaints, the story(ies) weren't bad and Hamilton's writing is good. Lee's performance was great.

Another Hamilton-Lee classic with a twist!

Salvation is a complicated Hamilton maze that John Lee narrates wonderfully. I can honestly say I didn’t see that coming at the end! The trail of crumbs were there but Hamilton masterfully leads you away from the trail. I look forward to the next part of our “Salvation”.

worth it

Hard to get through at first, but well worth it in the end. I noticed some people write this first book in the series is not worth reading. On to the next one. I will update this review after reading the next and offer whether I believe this assessment is true.
Joe Lee is a great narrator btw